BI Backup and Disaster Recovery – ASUG Webcast Part 1

This was an ASUG webcast that SAP provided earlier this year and I just found my notes from the session. While this is BI platform related, companies need to have a strategy for backup and disaster recovery.

The SAP speaker gave a story about disaster and recovery; need to test backups.

He said Murphy’s law happens, that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

Most consider disaster recovery to getting a root canal – best to be avoided.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

90% of companies will have significant data loss

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Why is a plan needed?

It is a precautionary measure in case of a full system failure – see figure above.

Figure 2 gives a real world example.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

BI is a key usage in decisional operational making

BI must be considered as part of Disaster Recovery plan

Figure 4: Source: SAP

Replication is the process of creating one or more copies of data

Example is mirrored drive

Replication offers real time data replication from data damage

Versioning creates multiple versions of a specific file of system; possible to revert to an earlier state – on the same host system

A cold backup is performed while the system is stopped (all nodes in your BI platform deployment) are unavailable to users.

For cold backups, the procedures can be performed in any order. You can do it in any order.

Use Cases for Backup and Restoring a BI Platform

You need to have a strategy

You need to find out the needs

Figure 8: Source: SAP

Use Cases for Backup and Restoring a BI Platform

Goal: Restore a System.

BI platform system was corrupted you need to restore it to the working state it was in when it was last backed up.

A machine hosting the BI platform was damaged. You need to replace it with a new machine.

The resources required are a target system with identical hardware to the source system and backups of the source system

Solution:

Follow the instructions on system backup and restore workflow. Read the “BI 4.1 Admin guide” for more details.

2. Then recreate target system from source system backups

Figure 9: Source: SAP

To restore objects you want to recover a document or other object that was accidentally deleted.

You need backups of the source system databases and files detailed system information

Using backups, build a copy of the system on another machine, using the System Copy workflow. Then, use the promotion management tools to promote the deleted objects from that new system.

You can create your target system on a computer with an existing BI platform deployment of the same release, support package, and patch level, or a “clean“ computer with no BI platform installed.

Figure 10: Source: SAP

The goal is to back up objects which is used for when you want to back up a small number of objects such as documents, folders, users.

The resources required include a system where promotion management versioning is in use.

The solution is to use the promotion management application to back up BI content and then export the content to BI Archive (LCMBIAR) files. You can restore it later, without restoring the entire system. This depends directly on your goal for backup and restore. The speaker said this is not the best way to do this due to Promotion Management’s primary purpose is to move content from dev to test and dev to prod.

1 Comment

I am looking forward to further improvements such as being able to restore files (reports, universes) from a backup directly to an existing SAP BI BusObjects platform, but in a new target folder. meaning: no need for an additional, separate SAP BI BusObjects platform just to restore files to, which are then promoted to the “real” SAP BI BusObjects platform.